Welcome to another installment of Starting Hex, a series about Warhammer Underworlds. This particular mini-series covers various aspects of the game that occur between players sitting down to play and beginning the first turn. When first getting into the game, I noticed that some players (myself included) just breeze through this stage of the game without making deliberate choices in order to get to playing the “real game” as fast as possible. I’ll be walking through the various steps of the Setting Up chapter in the rulebook and highlighting different things to keep in mind at each point to both help make conscious choices to strengthen your gameplay and also demystify the process for anyone who mentally lumps it into a nebulous “before the game” step.

If you turn to the section in the rulebook titled Setting Up (page 10 in the physical rulebook, page 6 in the digital rules), you’ll see the roadmap for this series. Today, we’re going to start with the first two steps since they’re not quite as deep as the others but I feel they still have some facets worth examining in detail.

Muster Warbands & Draw Starting Hands
Determine Territories
Place Treasure Tokens
Deploy Fighters

The first two steps are pretty light, so I’m going to combine them into one for today. Read on to delve into mustering warbands and drawing starting hands.

Muster Warbands

Mustering warbands is the first step that is performed when players sit down to play. It’s a fairly straightforward statement and makes sense when you read it, but there are a few points that have changed from the previous edition and stand out from other games.

In game terms, mustering your warband simply means you will reveal to your opponent your choices of warband and deck(s). This is open information in the game straight from the start, and having this knowledge can help you start to shape your game plan before even seeing a single card in your decks. In the previous edition of the game, there were no warscrolls and the deck you chose was hidden information that didn’t get revealed until you were already playing the game.

Warbands being open information (including fighter cards and warscroll) means they are things you or your opponent can reference at any point. I like that this information is available before the game really begins. It means that new players who haven’t gone full sweaty try-hard mode* and spent time memorizing every card in the game will still have some idea of what the opponent is going to do in the upcoming game. It also allows for the players who have more generic gaming experience, but perhaps not as much Underworlds experience, an opportunity to play around certain abilities. They might not know about the existence of certain ploys or objectives, but they can clearly see that the Emberwatch have Raptor Strike to finish off a vulnerable fighter or that Morgok’s Krushas can attempt to negate a ploy as it is played with Shut It, Pipsqueak.

*to be clear, there’s nothing wrong with being a sweaty try-hard as long as you’re not also a dick

The players’ choice of decks is also stated clearly from the start. In the Rivals format, each player will only have one deck with a fixed list of cards. This means that 100% of the cards in each players’ decks are (theoretically, memory and familiarity permitting) known factors. Since the Rivals decks are fairly consistent in what they’re trying to do, you’ll have a great idea of what the opponent’s goals are after they tell you which deck they’re playing. Blazing Assault is going to try to kill the enemy fighters, Reckless Fury will do something similar but care more about charging, Emberstone Sentinels puts an emphasis on holding treasure tokens, Pillage and Plunder will focus more on delving those treasure tokens, and so on.

In Nemesis, you won’t have quite as much information available from the start. Both players will still know which decks were chosen by their opponents, but they won’t necessarily know which cards have been chosen out of the pool of 40 power cards and 24 objective cards. With experience, you can make some pretty educated guesses that help narrow that number down, though. The two decks that are chosen can also give you a strong hint as to what the opposing plan is – Countdown to Cataclysm paired with Blazing Assault is going to look and play a fair bit different than Countdown to Cataclysm paired with Emberstone Sentinels.

Your opponent’s warband and decks aren’t just two pieces of the puzzle of figuring out their plan – it’s more like the entire outer edge of a puzzle, leaving just the interior bits for you to finish off. If you’re sitting down across from a player who brings Morgok’s Krushas and tells you they’re playing Blazing Assault and Reckless Fury, you might not know 100% of the cards they have chosen but you already know what they are going to try and do in the game (hit you, charge out their fighters and try to get yours to do the same, hit you again). Your opponent instead is bringing Grymwatch with Countdown to Cataclysm and Pillage & Plunder? They’re telegraphing that they want to play a little more passively and delve away the treasures.

As a player begins to pick up more familiarity with the game and recognizes what common warband/deck pairings are, the combination of the warband and decks can offer additional insight – are you playing into what’s an established archetype? Are you reasonably certain that you can identify what cards made the cut to be in their deck? Maybe your opponent has picked decks that feel very out of place with their warband. You’ll have to make the call on whether they’re attempting something sub-optimal or if they’ve discovered some wild tech that you aren’t aware of.

There are a few resources out there which can help if you want to get familiar with common warband and deck pairings. The wonderful folks over at Battle Mallet have a Nemesis Deck Library which includes a variety of different decks, including those from organized events like Adepticon, NOVA, and WTC. Additionally, the Staggerers blog has a similar resource in their list of Nemesis Decks for Warhammer Underworlds. The former contains historical decks from before rules updates, so they might not all be legal but it’s still useful for general knowledge (and those now-illegal decks are clearly marked as such). The latter resource has recently managed to have at least one deck listed for every warband. If you focus particularly on the decks that come from placing well in events, it’s a decent peek into what can be considered the Underworlds meta.

Another incredibly fascinating resource is the Warhammer Underworlds Statistics Project. Borni, Iba, and Henri have spent an incredible amount of time on this project. It allows you to analyze results of games played – either large ones that are tracked in BCP/Shadeglass/etc. or individual games uploaded by players. If you poke around in the data, you can find popular warbands, popular deck pairings, and where they overlap. It’s honestly an impressive tool that can be used to increase your understanding of the game or just poke around and look at the data for fun. I realize there’s only a subset of people who would ever “poke around data for fun” but I feel confident that the subset of Underworlds players and Goonhammer readers falls into that niche.

That’s a lot of words covering the step where you just tell your opponent what you’re playing. Let’s move on to some cards!

Draw Starting Hands

There’s no ambiguity on what happens at this step based off the name. Each player draws their starting hands for the game, consisting of three objective cards and five power cards. Once players have drawn their initial hands, they have the option for a redraw and choosing to get a fresh set of just their objectives, just their power cards, or their full hand.

There will be cards within your decks that you would rather see early and other cards that you’d prefer to see later in the game. A common beginner rule of thumb (and one even mentioned in the rulebook) is wanting ploys and surge objectives early, and if your initial hand doesn’t have those then you pitch it back to redraw. Ploys are handy because they are not gated behind glory like upgrades, and surge objectives are desirable at the start of the game because you can score them immediately to get that glory train rolling along which will help you equip those upgrades and churn through your objective deck faster (due to surge objectives replacing themselves with a fresh objective card immediately after scoring them).

When in doubt, this can be a useful heuristic to follow while getting more familiar with the game, but it’s worth pointing out some of the cases in which you’d prefer to hold onto that end phase heavy hand rather than pitch it back and hope for more surges. A good chunk of end phase objectives are going to become much harder to score as the game progresses. Key examples here are ones that require a certain number of fighters to be performing some kind of action like Supremacy from Emberstone Sentinels (hold two or more objectives with three or more bounty worth of fighters) or Broken Prospects from Pillage & Plunder (delve three different treasure tokens; easier to do before your dinky fighters start dying). Simply put, as the game drags on and more attacks happen, you’re simply going to have fewer and fewer fighters during each end phase, so the difficulty of scoring these will increase. These are the kind of end phase objectives that you might want to hold onto in your starting hand. Conversely, there are end phase objectives that get much easier as the game progresses. These often have requirements for “each fighter” to do something and, for the same reason as previously mentioned, the number of fighters tends to go down as the game progresses so hitting that threshold of “each fighter” becomes easier when there are half the number that you started with, for instance. Objectives like Unrelenting Massacre from Reckless Fury (every fighter has a charge token) and Stay Close from Wrack & Ruin (no fighters in edge hexes) are key examples of this type of end phase objective.

Ploys versus upgrades feels more straightforward to me, at least. I pretty much always want a nice chunk of ploys in my starting hand. If four to five of the starting five cards are upgrades, I’m inclined to throw them back. If I have three upgrades and two ploys, it comes down more to which specific ones I have in hand and how useful I expect them to be in the first round of the game. And, of course, there are some upgrades that feel more like ploys – the 0-cost Great Speed, Headlong Charge, and Canny Sapper are all able to be played before you earn any glory, so they function very similarly to a ploy. There are also a handful of upgrades that I would prioritize having access to early instead of late game. Parting Shot from Edge of the Knife is great if you can throw it out on the first fighter you shove up front into the enemy’s range to discourage attacks. The new Gifted Vitality from Raging Slayers heals the equipped fighter at the end of each round, so it’s going to have a larger overall impact if you can get it out in the first round.

Stay on your toes, though, because these priorities could also change based on what your opponent is bringing on their side of the table. Cards granting cleave or ensnare are obviously dependent on your opponent’s fighters’ saves (although it can still be useful for cracking through fighters on guard) and some cards like Gloryseeker could wind up being completely dead cards if the opposing warband doesn’t have any fighters with a health characteristic of four or greater. The infamous Wreckers from Countdown to Cataclysm is going to be easier to score against a weak horde than it will be against a lower model count elite warband.

It’s also possible that your approach hinges on a specific subset of cards in your deck. In this case, you could use the mulligan to aggressively target these linchpin cards. This could be useful if you’re playing Edge of the Knife but really want to have a certain fighter be tempered, so you’re fishing for Dark Horse or Running Riot. On the other hand, maybe you have cards you definitely do not want to see in your opening hand – whether these are an objective that would be difficult to score early (e.g. Unrelenting Massacre against a horde warband) or even a bunch of Emberstone ploys or upgrades when you’re playing the Realmstone Raiders deck and would prefer to reveal them via the Raid mechanic later in the game. If you want to dig into the odds of getting a particular card in your opening hand with or without mulligans (and factoring in various potential deck sizes), you can check out the article on Deck Size and Card Draw that I did a few months ago.

A few other things to keep in mind during the mulligan, should you elect to take one:

• You set aside the cards you want to mulligan away first, then draw the replacements, then shuffle the first hand back into your deck. This means you’ll never redraw a card that was in your initial starting hand.
• The cards you’re throwing back remain face down and hidden from the opponent the whole time. They won’t know what you are pitching and will not be able to play around anything in particular.
• You do have to choose whether you are pitching you objectives, power cards, or both all at once. No looking at the redrawn objectives and then deciding to also redraw your power cards.
• There weirdly isn’t any rule stating which player makes the decision to mulligan first. The information is all hidden so it shouldn’t matter much, but there’s always the tiny bit revealed from a player keeping an initial hand (presumably because they like it) versus redrawing a full hand (and being stuck with whatever it is regardless). I haven’t had this be an issue at any point, but it’s a weird omission from the rules…

That’s it for the pretty basic first steps of the Setting Up part of the game of Warhammer Underworlds. Stay tuned for the next installment that focuses on orienting the game board and thus shaping the battlefield for the entire game!

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